Millennia Group Blog

The open office concept is all the rage, both at work and on Wall Street. It is not only being executed in corporate offices but there is a booming industry of shared office space startups that take open office to a whole new level. These spaces do have some intriguing features like comfortable common areas to gather and in the case of shared office spaces like WeWork, beer on tap.

However, we have also seen the demoralizingly small workspaces at some companies and we hear the grumblings of workers about a lack of privacy and inability to focus. We are not owners of office buildings, nor space designers. We are, however, somewhat responsible for this phenomenon because we provide the tools that have enabled this to happen – workflow and document management. We do feel a little guilty, but enabling tiny workspaces isn’t the whole story.

We recently attended and exhibited at a technology trade show for the commercial real estate industry. The technologies that were in the spotlight were wide ranging from remotely monitored and controlled water values to AI solutions for recurring administrative tasks. Less “hot” technologies were also represented like accounting, lease management and of course workflow and document management systems.

Blockchain is poised to spice up the future of the document management world. There is quite a way to go before transactions are conducted and documented with blockchain documents. However, the concept is promising and it is sure to have an impact on how documents are stored, created, shared and even alter the definition of a document.

For over 20 years our company has been providing services and solutions to the commercial real estate industry. It’s a very large industry. Depending on which stats you read, the U.S. commercial real estate industry is valued at over $15 Trillion dollars and growing by almost $70 Billion a year. That is the size of the U.S. stock market.

The commercial real estate industry is also very complicated. It consists of developers, investors, advisors, managers, brokers and lenders. These parties form partnerships, joint ventures, REITs, TICs and dozens of ownership structures. And all these interested parties can be involved in a single property and they all have one thing in common - they have a copy of the same lease document. At least it should be the same document.

Millennia Group just wrapped up being a sponsor and participant in the 19th annual Realcomm IBCON tradeshow in San Diego. This is a show dedicated to the understanding and use of technology in the commercial real estate industry. As one might expect for a technology show, there were some familiar topics including robotics, artificial intelligence, blockchain, virtual reality and renewable energy.

The current news touches on these topics, but from a different angle; the death of the retail industry, the reshaping of office workers and their environments and Amazon warehouses – they’re popping up everywhere. After 19 years of participating in this industry trade show, it is still very clear, there is a long term focus in this industry, well beyond how these external forces will impact the next quarter.

I participated in a webinar recently sponsored by Realcomm, an organization devoted to the advancement of technology for the commercial real estate industry. It was about the future and hype verses reality. My contribution was squarely on the reality side as I described how our real estate clients gain efficiency by using workflow to automate document oriented business processes.

You might think, “do we still have documents?” The answer in my world and the foreseeable world of our Fortune 5000 clients is, Yes. Documents may not be in paper form any longer, but documents of some type (spreadsheet, PDF contract, etc.), are the support for data and todays decisions. But to see the future, the next big thing, you need to believe in the internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR).

During a recent lunch conversation a comment was made about the great benefits of business intelligence (“BI”) – a tool used to connect lots of information dots to generate useful data. However, that was quickly followed by a second comment about the often failed attainment of those benefits. The culprit seems to be bad or incomplete historical data, ie data stuck in documents or inconsistently entered data.

Another discussion at this lunch centered on co-tenancy, a complicated topic that impacts the commercial real estate industry. As an example, a co-tenancy clause could allow one tenant to reduce its rent if another, typically significant, tenant exits the property. The significant tenant is a draw to the property that benefits other tenants. So how do these two topics relate?

One of the main industries that Millennia Group supports is the commercial real estate industry. I am sure that this industry shares traits with many other industries in terms of technology solutions, things like single sign-on requirements, transitioning to cloud based email and new uses for CRM.

Another area that all industries have in common, and it is not a new problem, is called "silos of data." This is a situation where different sets of data reside in different applications or locations. The problem is that sometimes you need data from several of these "silos" to solve a problem or answer a question and the silos don't always talk. The answer to this problem has been the proliferation of data warehouses or business intelligence applications. These applications aggregate copies of data from many other applications into the warehouse and allow searching and slicing and dicing of data to get answers.

There seems to be a growing number of transactions happening in the business world. Heinz to buy Kraft, Sears to spin off properties to a REIT, Walgreens merges with Boots Alliance. These transactions all have consultants, investment bankers, appraisers, lawyers and many other people working to get the transaction completed. Two additional groups involved in these transactions are also very important, the internal IT department and their vendors.

There was a time not too long ago when the only electronic information transferred was the accounting system. That was challenging enough what with potentially different systems, formats or chart of accounts. Now include the ERP, CRM, ECM, DM and of course the file servers or cloud storage. Yes, the IT department is very busy when transactions occur and that in turn means their vendors are busy too.

Over the past decade, Millennia Group has been involved in many large real estate developments around the country. We support the developer's construction loan funding process. The simple explanation is that we help gather, organize and submit a digital copy of all the documentation that the bank requires before funding each construction loan draw request. These requests typically occur monthly.

The actual process is far more complicated and in fact is a marriage of documentation and data. This process happens to be one of the best examples of how document scanning married with data creates an incredibly powerful tool. In fact this should be the number one rule in document scanning.